David Brauer’s reporting on the local media scene is awesome, but one of his pieces from earlier today needs a little more specification.
In “Why newspapers matter”, Brauer justifies his volume of coverage on the demise of the Star Tribune by saying the “explanation that satisfies most is that papers have the biggest newsrooms and usually set the local news agenda.”
There’s a few small qualifiers that should be added to this.
Do the newspapers in the Twin Cities have the biggest newsrooms in the Twin Cities? From the numbers Brauer puts together, the answer is clearly yes. But, of course, size isn’t everything (make a “size” joke if you want).
Simply having the most reporters doesn’t de facto mean that the Star Tribune has the most impact on local news. If analysts and spectators have learned anything from the web’s impact on journalism, it’s that efficiency is vastly more important than sheer numbers.
Over the last year, I’d easily take an outlet staffed by a handful of web-savy independent journalists who consistently put out relevant information—or two Michael Rands and one Esme Murphy—over an entire institution of reporters who communicate only a handful of times a week.
Inefficiency is very much an issue, especially considering Brauer’s second justification for covering newspapers is that the newspapers set the local news agenda.
In terms of the places that Brauer listed—the TV stations, radio stations and the online outlets—yes, many of the stories in the Star Tribune are re-purposed for other outlets like the web and TV.
However, in terms of the total value of information people use, these outlets have a quickly diminishing audience. A very quickly diminishing audience, especially considering the newspapers don’t really publish information the majority of readers, via other news outlets or not, can use.
As a result, being at the top of the institutional food chain, well, it isn’t what it used to be, regardless of the number of reporters a newspaper has on payroll.
It’s funny, for the past several years institutional journalists have said, almost as if reciting a campaign talking point, “where would the blogs be without the newspapers?”
If these journalists are referring to the Huffington Post, well, they have a point. (“Thanks for telling me something I already know, you should write for the Huffington Post,” quips Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock.)
But if they are referring to the thousands of people who regularly rely of local and national blogs, Google, TMZ, the facebook, word of mouth, txt msging or any of the other ways to give and get information, these institutional journalists are willfully ignorant of the ascending paradigm shift.
In the national and local informational ecosystems (to use the jingoism), all but one or two large national newspapers like The Times are irrelavent. The reality is that very few online sources ever link to news stories that comes from institutional news.
The Pew study which came out and placed online news sources ahead of newspapers was, for this very reason, much more damning than was indicated, since the trickle down impact of newspapers is decreasing as rapidly as the readers and viewers of institutional news are aging.
So here’s what my contention boils down to: Brauer’s reasons for the relevance of covering newspapers so much only applies to the older model of the media, where news institutions take news from each other and only reach their diminishing audience, pre- all the other media developments of the last few years.
Instead of focusing on just institutional journalists and a handful of independents, it’s important to contextualize the fact that those institutions aren’t putting out information that’s as appealing or as useful or delivered in an increasingly accessible fashion to audiences as would be needed to sustain a news operation.
In the spirit of supporting Brauer’s work, which is, again, awesome, here’s two better reasons to focus so much on the papers. First, the newspapers are the first institutions to be swept by the changing models of media efficiency (it’s not as concise as “they’re the biggest”, but it’s just as accurate and more helpful). Second, the newspapers are the early victims (or earliest, depending on your perspective) of the communications paradigm shift.
And if you can see the qualification of those two points, you can see that newspapers actually don’t matter.
